Hoping to get some more opinions but I can respond these so far:
Thanks, from the feedback here we won't ban negative stuff at this point.
Yep we have received more than one phone call about you Ringman But yeah if you could just tone it down we would appreciate it. I've seen infraction systems implemented on forums I've frequented with mixed results.
The good is that it's fair, members get a couple of warnings with points deducted depending on the offence, and by the time they are banned it's usually pretty clear they deserve to be.
The bad is that 1) People still complain, 2) It does feel a little like disciplining a child 3) Fake accounts, which we could probably deal with but still more admin for us 4) We would still need to moderate fairly aggressively which is a lot of work (not just making edits, but literally trying to read every post isn't easy, especially when you already have a full time job).
That's definitely something we have been wanting to do on Harnesslink for a long time, and were hoping it would naturally happen here without us needing to solicit industry people. The tone of the forum as it is currently would definitely put quite a few people off though. One thing posters need to keep in mind is that for every member reading a post there are about 200 other unregistered people reading it, and forums are subject to a tribe mentality which can put people off.
Not necessarily as easy as it sounds (at least to me). For instance if somebody hears something unofficially that a driver is in trouble, then yeah this is probably hearsay (even if true) and shouldn't be talked about on a public forum. If then HRNSW publishes a story confirming it, then that can be posted. But then somebody comes along as says "this cheat ***** ***** etc then that's too far. That's just one example, but the problem is it's pretty hard to draw a line in the sand... though we need to be the ones to draw it and I'll look into some formal rules. If you have any feedback regarding this please let me know.
We can detect this, not a perfect solution though. For example there are a couple of posters who I suspect are different people from their writing style, but they are using the same computer.
It seems you guys aren't to keen for a private forum or anything like that. And at this point I'm a bit reluctant to get into a infraction type system, though this might need to be implemented in the future.
From the experience he had on Harnesslink, requiring facebook/real names, I'm thinking the cleanest solution would be to require everybody to list their real names alongside their username. I know some people might object to that, but honestly if you have a big problem with that your probably not the type that people want on here in the first place.
If you do have a legitimate cause to not post your real name just PM me the reason and I could circumvent the requirement on your account. For example I work online, so my when somebody Google's my name I don't want them getting hundreds of harness racing forum results, but that wouldn't be a problem for most people.